3 minutes
Marketing to members isn’t a cut and dry process, especially in a world where consumers are more engaged and informed than ever before. Financial institutions, bound by strict regulations and the need to protect customer information, need customizable marketing and management tools to reach existing and potential customers. Marketing to members is more complex than orchestrating email blasts and catchy slogans, however, solutions do exist to simplify this process for credit unions.
Customized marketing and management solutions help align sales and marketing efforts, leading to faster real-time information sharing, shared strategies and more effective campaigns. Because of these better aligned processes, CMM leads to stronger and longer relationships with members. Using CMM solutions, credit unions can gain valuable insight into member feedback, as well as analytics. This aids in the fine tuning of messages for future marketing campaigns. Aligning both sales and marketing also creates a consistent brand image across all member touch points.
The goal of a customer and marketing management system is to provide organizations with a complete view of their customers at every stage in the marketing and sales cycle. These customer findings can then combine with business performance insights, using a business intelligence platform, to assist credit unions during their strategic planning process to more accurately identify trends, forecast growth and adapt their business plans accordingly.
There are a wide variety of CMM solutions including customer relationship management, marketing management, configure price quote and business intelligence:
CRM is an application that can include sales, customer service, marketing analytics and reporting. This breadth allows organizations to manage the full customer lifecycle in one environment, access relevant data to help win customers, manage future sales opportunities and deliver great customer service. While most credit unions have websites, they can also extend their online CRM tools by building programs to help customers answer account transaction queries and resolve problems. These online initiatives are saving banks money by replacing traditional human-staffed support centers. They’re also strengthening relationships and building community by proactively addressing customer complaints and facilitating more direct and immediate dialogue.
Marketing Management integrates customer data across disparate source systems. It allows organizations to plan, execute and monitor crucial multi-channel marketing campaigns. For example, one large credit union installed software that uses real-time analysis of historical, personal, and contextual information to help call center agents present the most attractive offers to members while they have them on the phone, which led to a 50 percent increase in revenues over five years.
Configure Price Quote is a solution that integrates with existing CRM systems to forecast data back into the CRM system producing accurate sales quotes and/or proposals. Together these two systems can shorten sales cycles and increase overall organizational efficiency. CPQ tools are helpful for call center agents to configure bundles from the credit union’s product catalog, no matter how complex the customer requests can become.
Business Intelligence is a toll that brings together all financial performance management applications, packaged analytics and compliance tools that operate across the complex web of enterprise systems. BI software collects real-time data from a company’s source applications and translates it into business insights with an easy-to-read user interface. BI enables a credit union to better understand risk, performance and the impact of decisions company-wide faster than ever before.
CMM tools can help reduce the time it takes to create and execute a new strategy and can be integrated with other tools to create a holistic view of the credit union and its members. Marketers in financial services have begun to operate with a new set of priorities such as increasing tailored conversations with members, improving brand awareness and boosting the amount of data collected on member behaviors. In order to meet these new standards, more of the budget has also been allocated to increasing data and analytics, marketing automation, social media marketing, content management and email marketing.
The proper tools are paramount to running a member-focused organization and surpassing competitors. After doing your homework – which one is right for where you want to be?
Stewart Applbaum is SVP/general manager at Infor, New York, innovate@infor.com.
